Staff Spotlight - Jonny Hopper

[Lionhead Studios]

Staff Spotlight - Jonny Hopper

Hi gang, how about this? Love it? Hate it? What shall I change?Hi there, I’m Jonny, I’m Lead Tools Engineer on Fable Legends. I like rock climbing, posting pictures of my pug Frank on the internet (@FrankWonderpug) and erroneously capitalising words. I’ve been a Lionhead for 6 months now (this time). Previously I worked at Lionhead (way back in 2006 when computers were steam powered and mobile phones came in a rucksack), then Media Molecule where I wrote the Popit level editing tools for the LittleBigPlanet games. Then I was Technical Director at a small company called Ambient for a while. We almost made a game called Death Inc. We almost did a lot of things. BUT ENOUGH OF THAT! So, what does the day-to-day life of this irridescent, mystical figure called Lead Tools Engineer entail? Presumably it’s all about sipping champagne in a hot tub, day trading frozen orange juice and pork bellies, hurtling expensive cars off cliffs then jumping out and unfurling a Chicken Chaser parachute?Well, it’s close. My job is basically “Make other people’s lives easier” but examining out problems in the workflows and pipelines we use to produce the game, and figuring out how to fix them. This could be “it takes 5 minutes to do task X” or “Thing Y only works 50% of the time”. Thing is, most of these things have fairly easy workarounds but when you’re the guy who just wants to test your latest animation in the game you need everything to Just Work And Work Fast.I suppose in some ways the goal of my job is to not have a job. If everything is working correctly I get nervous.In many ways it’s more of a people job than a code job (Although my background is largely technical). People get upset when they have problems and a part of my role is trying to figure out exactly a) what they’re trying to do and b) what is not working. In a large project with a large team there’s 1000 things (give or take) that could go wrong at any one time. People often ask me (well, I was asked as part of this) “How did you get your first job in the games industry?” The answer is actually pretty simple: Work hard and be persistent. The practicalities are harder: Find the job you want to do, get really really good at it, find a place you want to do it at, convince them that you’re really good at the job you want to do and that they’d be mad fools not to hire you, collect first paycheck.I did work experience here at Lionhead back in the day and during that time I kept bugging them until they let me do a longer internship. At the time there wasn’t really an official route for progressing from an internship, however being blunt and asking straight out for a job can definitely pay off. Thanks for reading! Jonny   Discuss this on our forums

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